In August of the current year the inflow of money transfers from foreign countries to Georgia decreased significantly because of hostilities in the country. In the reporting month the volume of money transfers from abroad constituted 73.8 million USD, which is 23.7 million USD less than the same figure for July of the current year, 6.2 million USD less than the average figure for the first seven months of the current year and 9.2 million USD less than the same figure for August of the last year. Although, traditionally at this period of the year the volume of money transfers to Georgia tends to increase (see graph).

Aforementioned is mainly caused by decrease of money transfers from Russia and Armenia (18.4 and 1.5 million USD less compared to previous month, respectively).  Compared to July of the current year the volume of money transfers also decreased for the following countries: Ukraine (by 0.9 million USD), Italy (by 0.7 million USD), Spain (0.4 million USD), some other countries as well.

90.6 percent of total money transfers fall on those big eight donor countries, from which the volume of such transfers exceeds 1 million USD (see the table)

	Volume of money transfers in August, 2008 Million US Dollars	Structure of money transfers by the biggest donor countries %
		August, 2007	August, 2008
Total	73.8	100.0	100.0
Russia	45.0	65.5	61.0
USA	5.4	16.1	7.4
Ukraine	5.0	1.6	6.8
Greece	3.9	2.0	5.2
Italy	2.5	0.3	3.4
Turkey	2.3	2.0	3.1
Spain	1.4	2.6	1.9
Armenia	1.3	0.2	1.8

It is notable, that in August of the current year 5.7 million USD was transferred from Georgia, i.e. 3.5 million USD (by 37.9 percent) less than in the previous month and 5.7 million USD less (twice as little) than in August 2007. The volume of money transfers from Georgia to Russia also decreased significantly, by 1.6 million USD (44.0 percent) and 4.4 million USD (67.9 percent) respectively, and constituted 2.1 million USD.

In August of the current year the most popular among the fast money transfer systems for sending money to Georgia were:, Western Union (27.8 percent of total amount), Anelic (16.6 percent), Contact (15.4 percent), Unistream (11.3 percent), Money Gram (6.4 percent), Leader (5.6 percent).

For money transfer from Georgia most popular in August was Western Union - 49.6 percent of total transfers to other countries. Next come Anelik (18.2 percent), Intel Express (14.5 percent), Leader Unistream (3.1 percent) and Money Gram (2.0 percent).  (7.5 percent),

Present statistical information is being published on the statistics headlines.